Yeah, I just don't have the bandwidth to deal with a lot of explanation today.  We can revisit this later: I will say that once again, the photos are in reverse order   >:(

 I have a couple months of trips and photos to blog, and a lot of photos I've already uploaded but not yet sorted through.   The first trip was for Thanksgiving to visit New Mexico and my youngest child as well as my newest grandchild (the later was only a couple weeks old!)  I drove cross country with Cinnamon, and we stopped two nights each way to make for an easier drive.  Gone are the days where I'd drive 15- 17 hours straight!  On they way down I stopped at Barstow and Holbrook.  Both stops were pretty uneventful. Because it was raining most of the trip, I didn't make any of my usual stops, and I was a bit sad passing the Continental Divide landmark without snapping at least one photo due to the pouring rain. After Thanksgiving I had more opportunity to use the camera, driving into the BioPark in Albuquerque on Saturday to visit the zoo and Sunday to go to the Botanical Gardens for the River of Lights. For some reason Blogger uploads them in the r...

This morning I woke up with a headache that had nothing to do with a hangover and everything to do with the kind of stress I face this time of year.  I tend to try to buy into the idea that this is a season of joy, and that it's all about families and parties, and wearing terrible sweaters for a laugh, but this is the last dying gasp of a year that I had pretty much figured out, before going into a new year that's a whole new set of chaos. One of the issues I've faced is the issue of how I've paid into Social Security over the years.  As a contract engineer, I had zero benefits (and zero retirement) but that was so long ago that my annual earnings hardly add up to make a Social Security benefit I could live on, and since I left teaching (where I made significantly more money) before I was fully vested (because Lupus) and the districts I worked for didn't always participate in Social Security, I rely on a pretty small check every month after working since I was 11 y...